Joe Judge received one simple piece of advice from Bill Belichick after landing the New York Giants’ head-coaching job:
Don’t try to be Bill Belichick.
The now-former New England Patriots special teams coordinator/wide receivers coach said Thursday during his introductory Giants news conference that he plans to bring his own personality and coaching style to his new post.
“I’m going to be honest with you, the only advice I really sought from (Belichick) in terms of this opportunity — he told me, ‘Just be yourself,’ ” Judge told the assembled media members. “And that’s all I know how to be. I think one of the things people ask me a lot is, ‘You worked for Coach (Nick) Saban and Coach Belichick. What makes you different?’ Look, I’m myself. I’m going to be myself every time. If I’m anything else, everybody’s going to see straight through it. And if you lie to the team, you’re going to lose the team immediately.
“So I’m going to always be myself. And that’s a little bit different than other people, and that’s fine. I’m not trying to emulate anyone I’ve ever worked for. I’m trying to take what I’ve learned from them, match it with my own belief structure and do it with my own personality.”
Judge worked under Saban at Alabama for three seasons before joining Belichick’s Patriots staff in 2012. One of the most important lessons he learned from Belichick, Judge said during Thursday’s presser, was the importance of maximizing the versatility of his players.
“What I learned from coach Belichick was real simple: Be flexible within your personnel,” said Judge, who was in charge of New England’s special teams for the last five seasons. “Don’t try to shove round pegs into square holes. Figure out what you have. Let them play to their strengths. Don’t sit in a meeting and tell me what you don’t have in a player. Don’t tell me they can’t do a certain thing. Tell me what they can do and then we’ll figure out as coaches, because that’s our job, how we can use that. That’s our responsibility. Everybody has something they can do.
“How may castoffs do you see around the league that end up on another team and everyone says, ‘Wow, how’d they get that out of him?’ Maybe they were just closing their eyes to what they could do. As a coaching staff when we get assembled, we have to make sure we’re sitting down, we’re patient with our players, we fully evaluate them, we find out what they can do to be an asset, and then we’re not foolish enough to not use that.”
